Very cool! However, I would be concerned about the safety of driving such a small car.
We seriously need to de-escalate from this mentality in the U.S. There's nothing inherently dangerous about everyone driving smaller and lighter vehicles, and if we find the political will it'd be easy to put society on that trajectory. Convincing people of the damage they're doing to our environment by driving unnecessarily large vehicles is probably the place to start.
7 - 14 sitting kids in front of your vehicle and you can't see any of them if you trying to see them.
People are buying heavier and bigger cars to offset life risk onto other drivers. Less risk for one driver equals more risk for somebody else.
And it's not a "zero sum game". Pollution and energy usage increases and so the risk for pedestrians.
I could see a market of selling them to fleet operators who team up with cities to get free parking for them, as Zipcar and Car2go do, but that’s about it.
Or around towns. I could use this to go around my town, and to the surrounding towns.
And people could use it around suburbs too.
So useful to people in cities, towns, suburbs, which is most people.
I think a city setting might be better, for cities without too much congestion at least. Otherwise it's another vehicle on the road that could be a moped taking up way less space to move a single butt from their home to their desk in some office building. Cars pollute, but part of their harm in an urban environment is also the amount of physical space that they demand. You can fit way more people in an electric subway train than you can in a similar length line of traffic of these vehicles, for instance.
The one thing I would say is I wish the range were a bit higher. We have a Ford C-Max plug-in hybrid that gets 18-25 miles before turning on the gasoline motor. Two trips in succession will sometimes run out the electricity. A 50 mile range would make me more comfortable, but still I'm excited to see a vehicle like this (even if I'm not super-hopeful they'll catch on in the US).
Now, since this is a smaller vehicle with a smaller battery, it might able to charge faster on 110, but likely you'd want a 220 charger.
Really, it feels like all EVs will need a 220 line to be practical. Small-battery and PHEVs need frequent top-ups and you don't want those to take hours, and full EVs just take forever to charge on 110.
I saw a demonstration of an electric moped that worked like this. You pull up to the station, put your empty batteries in the rack for charging, and take a set of full ones.
Fully charged EV faster than filling up a tank of gas.
We've been siloing our thinking that an EV should be some quasi hybrid between plugging in your phone to charge, and putting in a gas pump into a car. The best and most practical EV in the future will look nothing like a car today. Maybe in the future we will just bring back street car wiring to our cities and run an antennae above the vehicle like a bumper car.
Swapping batteries makes sense for a car you don't own. For a car you own, I don't know. Of course car ownership is probably going away soon enough.